Method and Structure

Introduction: What Does Sexism Actually Sound Like? 43

It further cannot be placed neither on the side of the listener, nor on the side of the sound alone. Much more, the ‘sonical’ can be understood as structuring the encounter of music and listener, enabling the process of experiencing music in the first place.75

Method and Structure

In the following I will start with the development of this book’s “Tools of Analysis” (chapter 1). In it I will present various ways (associations, homologies, the genotext, auditory pleasures, the sonical body, and the vocalic body) of thinking about and examining the complex relationships we all entertain with music and sounds. In the context of this book, these are tools for music analysis that will be applied in the closer examination of the six musical examples. However, they can also be used beyond that as tools for reflecting on one’s own music listening. It is, however, not my aim to provide an overarching theory of ‘how music works’. I do not want to pin ‘music’ down in this form, but rather to open possible approaches that can be expanded or adapted as needed. Then, I will use my toolbox to analyze the effect and production of gender in my examples of popular music. Here, I will start with two examples of male (White, cis, hetero, able-bodied …) voices. I will show that such privileged voices are also (often unmarked) at the center of many music descriptions and further, that this centrality not only plays a role in discourses about music, but is also produced in the sound itself.

75 I see this idea of coupling as closely related to the concept of listening as it is used in “the listening ear” by Jennifer Stoever (2016), as “listening to listening” by Nina Sun Eidsheim (2018), or as “hungry listening” by Dylan Robinson (2020). These authors argue that in the process of listening, pre-shaped culturalized expectations and desires of the listeners limit and focus and thus coproduce what can and will be heard. Thus, particularly Whiteness is produced and naturalized in practices of listening that focus on the sounds of racialized

Others as materials for consumption. Most of this great work was not available, when I developed my own theories as I present them in this book, which is why

I will point to it in footnotes, but not in the main text.

44 Hearing Sexism

This production of centrality in sound is dependent on certain aesthetic notions, which I will refer to as the ‘real’ voice. This is a style of singing connected to aesthetic paradigms of emotional truthfulness, spontaneity and authenticity. This ‘real’ voice as I will show, also contains an invitation to identification, which further fosters the privileging of a hegemonic White male concept of the body.

To contrast this, the four examples of White female voices, that I will deal with in the third chapter, cannot be understood according to the same aesthetic model. As I will show, sexualizations and a positioning of female singers as counterparts to the listener, instead of identification figures, can be analyzed and determined in sound. These ‘other’ vocalizations contain aesthetic potentials beyond the aesthetic paradigm of the ‘real’ voice. While this may also have potentials for empowering listening strategies for (White, heterosexual, able-bodied) female listeners, it is nonetheless problematic that overall different concepts of the body are conveyed which tend to either make the body of the analyzed female singers disappear or turn into an object.

Overall, I will be concerned with naming different musical experiences, to achieve a more nuanced understanding. In affirmative modes of music consumption, individuals relate on an intimate and affective level to musical pieces, which thus move listeners physically and emotionally. In current discourses, such inner movements are usually only discussed in general terms, but not in their specificity. However, I am interested in exactly who is moved how and where, and how these movements interact with, or rather, play their roles in overarching social structures such as sexism.

All in all, I hope to make sexism actually audible in my examples and beyond them. In the conclusion, I would like not only to summarize my results, but also to reflect on possible political consequences of my findings.